Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Fake Twitter Accounts Get Real Laughs

WASHINGTON — When a blizzard blanketed Chicago last week, “Rahm Emanuel” took to Twitter to chronicle his day — making a snow angel on Lake Michigan, shoveling out David Axelrod’s Civic, drinking whiskey in an igloo made by a tireless campaign intern named Carl.

Except, of course, these urgent updates were not from the actual Mr. Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff who is running for mayor of Chicago and who has his own — far more professional and less profanity-laden — Twitter feed. They were from a fake account in his name, an online alter ego created anonymously.

Fake Twitter personalities mock actors like Chuck Norris and world leaders like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose faux feed suggested that “Muslim Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants!” would be a great “political movie mash-up.”

But figures from the worlds of Washington and politics are particularly attractive targets for the mock Twitter treatment.

There is the Twitter doppelganger of the executive editor of the Politico Web site, @FakeJimVandeHei, a wisecracking, tyrannical presence in the newsroom, threatening to fire reporters who link to rival news organizations in their articles and waking dozing colleagues with a bullhorn.

There is @DCJourno, a self-described “important political reporter in Washington” who recently advised cable television bookers that he would be happy to appear on their shows to talk about Egypt — he has, after all, “been following this stuff pretty closely for almost a week.” And there was a short-lived Twitter feed in the guise of Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

Photo

Rahm Emanuel is one of many political figures who have twins on Twitter.Credit
Scott Olson/Getty Images

“I love that we have no idea who is behind them, and that’s part of the fun,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “The fact that people are facilitating those conversations anonymously is in many ways completely anti-Washington, where you have such a name-obsessed culture, and now some of the most pointed observations are coming from people who don’t have real names. In that regard, it’s even more perfect.”

But that has not stopped people from guessing. The Washington parlor game of the moment is trying to puzzle out just who is behind each new parody account. Casual conversations in newsrooms, at bars and even over Twitter are peppered with allusions to “fake Rahm Emanuel” and “DCJourno” as the city’s insiders laugh about the accounts and lament that they did not think of them first.

The real Jim VandeHei jokingly says that he thinks John F. Harris, who co-founded Politico with him, might be behind @FakeJimVandeHei, “though he’s much funnier than the posts suggested.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“I have suspected he wanted a way to unload on me, but didn’t have the heart to do it in person,” Mr. VandeHei said in an e-mail.

Twitter allows parody accounts as long as they are labeled as such, and many of the site’s most popular tweets are comedic — in 2010, the most re-tweeted message was a 10-word missive about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from the comedian Stephen Colbert: “In honor of oil-soaked birds, ‘tweets’ are now ‘gurgles.’ ”

The person behind the handle @DCJourno, who would not reveal his identity and agreed to be interviewed only via e-mail, said that he started the account in the hope that it might make its targets a bit more self-aware. His tweets totter between fact and fiction so closely that he said: “Several of my followers still don’t understand that I’m a parody. They think I’m just a cool D.C. journalist, which really says it all.”

Betsy Rothstein, the editor of Fishbowl DC, a media and gossip blog, offers her own take on Washington by mining the real Twitter feeds of the chattering class for embarrassing fodder. And not every fake account carries a household name. Someone, for example, has created a fake account for Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant.

“Whoever does this does it to mock me. And while on the one hand it’s flattering that someone would take the time to follow my life so closely, on the other hand, it makes you realize how ridiculous you are,” Mr. Mackowiak said. “The one thing everyone in Washington can use is a check on their own ego.”

A few minutes later, he e-mailed with an even more optimistic perspective: “Finally, I can say Brad Pitt and I have something in common.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 10, 2011, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: You Wouldn’t Believe What Rahm Emanuel Is Saying on Twitter. Neither Does He. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe